Hawaii plays key role in Indo Pacific, U.S. ambassador to Mongolia says

As a young person coming of age in California and Waipahu, U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia Richard L. Buangan did not envision a career in foreign service.

It was a visit from a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State while Buangan was attending St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, that inspired him to pursue the path, he told students, faculty and staff of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Center for Indo-Pacific Affairs on Friday.

The Center for Indo-­Pacific Affairs was created in September through a three-year, $1 million grant secured by U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono to “provide education, training and professional development opportunities for students and U.S. government personnel to better meet national security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region,” according to a news release from the university. Buangan spent more than an hour Friday talking, taking questions from students and faculty, and encouraging the exploration of a career in foreign service.

He lived in Waipahu for four years — the “formative years” as he calls them — and after starting his job as the chief of the U.S. mission to Mongolia in October, he said he was happy to have a brief reprieve in Hawaii, wearing an aloha shirt.

His father was in the Navy and the family moved around a lot. but “I consider myself very much a son of Hawaii and California,” he said.

Buangan was in town for a meeting at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command with more than two dozen other chiefs of mission and senior policymakers “for a regional ambassadors conference to discuss threats and ways to promote a free and open Pacific,” according to a tweet from U.S. INDOPACOM.

“Why all of this matters … why your presence here … why Hawaii, at the crossroads of the Pacific, is an important place for us, not just for Americans that are looking West, but Asians who are looking East,” said Buangan, speaking to students. “When we talk about the Indo Pacific, when we talk about all of the countries in this region … ranging from Sri Lanka to Hawaii to as far North as Japan and Mongolia and as far south as New Zealand and our Pacific islands, this is a big region, and we often tell people that the United States is a Pacific country. We engage in this region when we invest in the relationships that we have, not just with our allies and partners, but also our competitors and our adversaries when we engage in diplomacy.”

Buangan started out as a management officer in the State Department, a position in every mission responsible for the operations of the embassy, from motor pool maintenance to real estate negotiations with the host nation.

Over the course of more than two decades with the department, Buangan worked as a public affairs officer at the Consulate General of the United States in Jerusalem, Press Attache at Embassy Beijing, as well as entry-level assignments in Paris and Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

He recalls his time in Beijing as being before the “Great Fire Wall” and when the key phrase they were taught was “there’s no problem in the world that cannot be solved without the U.S. and China working together.”

“Now, when you say that, obviously it’s the opposite,” he said. “It’s very much an adversarial and competitive relationship. But at the time (2008), the U.S. and China were working really closely together.”

He most recently served in the Bureau of Global Public Affairs as acting assistant secretary and as principal deputy assistant secretary and previously worked as deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy and regional security policy in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Buangan credits his time as executive assistant to former Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, where he had to manage every aspect of his travel, meetings, schedule and other duties as a “really good window into the diplomacy of the secretary of state.”

“Say what you will about his policies or the policies of the Trump administration, working for a secretary of state in as close a position as his executive assistant is … one of the true rare jobs that any foreign service officer has because you get to see firsthand the diplomacy of an individual who is so powerful and so close to the president of the United States that you can only sort of learn … and you know the foreign-policy issues that were front and center during the Trump administration,” Buangan said.

Mongolia, a democratic ally of the U.S., very much wants a closer relationship with our country, he said, but must navigate its landlocked reality of bordering both China and Russia.

He pointed out how the Mongolian economy sends 80% of its goods through China, and struggled when China closed its borders during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also complicating matters is Mongolia’s dependence on Russia for energy.

If China doesn’t like Mongolia’s relationship with the U.S. and China, it can close its borders, as it did during the pandemic.

“We have to think about nontraditional constructs of economic engagement,” he said. “It isn’t just traditional … trade, and flying goods and services in and exchanging that. Mongolia is a landlocked country, so we have to think about ways that we are not only increasing the amount of trade and investment between our two countries, but we are building a more resilient Mongolian economy.”